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Die As You Choose The need for laws on euthanasia cannot be dodged for much longer. In one of the world’s smaller countries, mercy-killing is accepted by the medical establishment and openly practiced a few thousand times each year. In one of the world’s biggest countries, euthanasia is condemned by the medical establishment, secretly practiced many times more often, and almost never comes to light. Which of these countries has a mercy-killing doctor now languishing in its jails? It is the small one, Holland, which has rules for euthanasia and so can police it effectively. The Dutch doctor broke his country’s rules. There is a moral here for all the countries, and not just for the big death-forbidding country, America. Right now it is going over the arguments about euthanasia once again. In January the Journal of the American Medical Association published a bizarre letter, in which an anonymous doctor claimed to have killed a 20-year-old cancer patient at her own request. This started a debate that will rumble on into the autumn, when Californians may vote on a proposed law legalizing euthanasia. The letter was probably written for polemical impact. It is scarcely credible. Its author claims that he (or she) met the cancer patient for the first time, heard five words from her –“Let’s get this over with”-then killed her. Even the most extreme proponents of euthanasia do not support such an action in those circumstances. Yet medical monstrosities that are hardly any better undoubtedly continue, almost as a matter of macabre routine, in America, Britain and many other countries. It is disturbingly easy to find doctors who will say, in private, that they sometimes kill patients on purpose. Most say they know somebody else who does. But because they can rarely discuss euthanasia openly with patients –even when those patients beg them for it –doctors tend to kill only when the dying are too far gone to consent. Thus, because voluntary euthanasia is taboo, a doctor makes